Google has been been cracking down on installing .apk’s on your phone for years and they’re getting more and more aggressive about it. It’s not a question of if they’ll disallow it completely, but when.

It’s already extremely tedious. Back in the Android 2.3 days (oh, good old Gingerbread) you could just get an APK and install it, but those times are long gone.

Years ago they threatened the developer of Total Commander to remove his app from the PlayStore unless he patched out an APK install feature, so he was forced to do that.

Now another example: Try to install eBay on a phone that is not passing device integrity. It is not listed on the PlayStore because your device doesn’t pass safety checks. You can grab an APK and install it, but the OS will check if the app has been installed through the PlayStore and if it hasn’t, it will complain and close itself.

GrapheneOS has patched that bullshit out, btw.

And this behaviour happens with all apps where the developer has enabled the “App Integrity” option, which is heavily pushed as a super-great security feature. So developers might just enable that feature, not being fully aware of the implications.

As you can see, it’s one method at a time, slowly but surely, until Google fully controls the ecosystem. The intention behind that is pretty clear: They don’t want people to have AdAway and Revanced, they want money and user data. And they also want you to login to the PlayStore, get hooked on their stupid daily points challenges and spend your hard-earned money on virtual crap.

This is textbook enshittification, it will only get worse from here on.

That sounds more like your drive not being supported by LibreDrive. OP talked about expired beta keys, which is a current problem with makemkv.

Yes.

Regards,
The Movie Industry

I gave in and bought makemkv yesterday. It just works.

Well…looks like my employer will have to buy me a Macbook soon.

there’s not a lot that non-Apple users can do with them

Oh, there is.
I am a web developer and I use this to run Safari and the iOS simulator without paying Apple’s “debugging tax”.

And depending on how OpenAI tweaked it this time it will either realize its mistake after being made aware of it or double down even harder on it.

I only use it for coding and it once told me my code not working was due to a bug in Webkit, so I asked it which bug specifically. It created links to bug reports but rewrote the titles of them. So initially it looked like it had numerous sources that backed up its statement but when I clicked on them those were bugs about totally different things.

It would not back down even after I specifically told it “You just made all of this shit up and even rewrote the titles” and got stuck in a loop of “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong and I am 100% sure I haven’t made a mistake”.

Kinda creepy. Especially when you think about the system rewriting reality when it comes to much more important things. Let’s just reinvent some history, that would be a good idea, right?

Thought this was an Alien: Earth quote, but that was actually “When is a machine not a machine?”.

I’m sure most of the Germans will continue using their illegal adblockers. This ruling is ridiculous.

Yes, it’s really good! I still run it with proton, because I couldn’t find a good alternative on Linux. banshee is unmaintained (it was my favorite for a long time) and all others have their shortcomings in some way or another.